It’s always wise to remember, if a quote is too perfect to be true, it probably isn’t. Examples abound on Facebook and in viral emails. And occasionally you can find an example in the Star’s Letters to the Editor.
The Star’s editorial staff should have caught this one, and if they decided to publish it anyway, at least they should have included a note under it. The last letter in Friday’s Star has a quote the writer states is from “Cicero, 55 BC.” It’s a beaut. And it’s a phony.
“The Budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed, lest Rome will become bankrupt. People must again learn to work instead of living on public assistance.”
That perfect-for-conservatives quote should have set off the editors’ crap detectors—light flashing, sirens screaming. All it takes is a quick internet search to find the words didn’t come from Cicero. The top three Google hits name the source. It’s from a 1965 novel, A Pillar of Iron, by Taylor Caldwell. And even there, it’s different from what’s in the letter. The lines in the novel aren’t spoken by Cicero. They’re the fictional words of another character, Antonius, paraphrasing Cicero, meaning the wording in the Star “quote” had to be tweaked a bit. And the last sentence is a reworking of Caldwell’s words, mainly for the purpose of replacing the Caldwell/Cicero/Antonius phrase, “the mob” with a more acceptable “people.”
But I guess I shouldn’t be too hard on the Star. Louisiana Representative Otto Passman read the phony quote into the Congressional Record in 1968. It appeared in a letter in the Chicago Tribune in 1971. And if you go onto the Forbes website, the bogus quote is at the top of the “Thoughts on the Business of Life” page.
According to a number of sites, there is an actual Cicero quote that Caldwell probably built on to create the passage in her novel: “The arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed, lest Rome fall.” The problem is, it’s not nearly as sexy. Nothing about refilling the treasury, reducing public debt or getting people off the public dole. (BTW, I wasn’t able to locate this quote on anything that looked like a scholarly site, so I can’t be certain it’s accurate.)
Bonus Bogus Lincoln Quote: In 2011, our once-state-senator Al Melvin put up a series of tweets quoting Lincoln making all kinds of conservative-friendly statements. The problem is, the quotes were made up in 1916 and 1917 and had been debunked long before they got into Melvin’s hands. They were being quoted so often by Republicans over the years that the RNC warned its speakers, “Do not use them as Lincoln’s words!” Reagan, apparently, didn’t get the memo. He included them in a speech at the Republican National Convention.
This article appears in Apr 14-20, 2016.
There must be a way to blame this on immigrants.
This is too funny. I got this in an email yesterday. This Cicero character is getting around.
“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero
My favorite Lincoln quote, and what fueled American success:
“Property is the fruit of labor…property is desirable…is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise. Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another; but let him labor diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built.” Abraham Lincoln March 21, 1864
Where did we go wrong?
Would you rather just settle for $15 an hour?
“The first duty of a man is the seeking after and the investigation of truth.”
— Cicero (106-43 BC)
Make mine Tocqueville:
Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude. Alexis de Tocqueville
Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom. Alexis de Tocqueville
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/a/alexis_de_tocqueville.html
I prefer Savage.
” liberalism is a mental disorder”
“The enemy is within the gates; it is with our own luxury, our own folly, our own criminality that we have to contend.” Cicero.
And don’t forget, his highborn enemies nailed Cicero’s head and both his hands to the Rostra in the Forum of Rome.
Had a funny feeling I’d rattle a few cages with that one.
I would rather get back to robbing Peter to pay Paul discussion. You know Prop. 123!
The wrong message, solving a problem in a way that makes another problem worse, producing no net gain. You know Prop. 123! Could have been Cicero, but I doubt it.